


they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns

by OAbsalom



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Loss, Loss of Faith, Love, Non-Explicit Sex, Oral Sex, Romance, canon-typical hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:00:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24558052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OAbsalom/pseuds/OAbsalom
Summary: As the years ambled on, they drew together more closely. A slow but inevitable orbit of two celestial bodies drawn together by some fault of their own gravities. Why be so far from the only companion you’ve known? They were the only of their kind, some amalgamation of not-quite-shouldn’t-be and not-quite-should. Not-quite-evil and not-quite-good. To whom could they belong but one another? Where could they call home throughout the ages but one another’s earshot?(A look at Crowley and Aziraphale's inevitable relationship and how it changed when they realized they'd lose one another forever at the end of the world.)[done now!]
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mackaley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mackaley/gifts).



> Happy birthday, [Mackaley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mackaley)! I cannot believe you believed you wouldn't get a fic out of this.
> 
> I love you. Thanks for being my number one fan.

They wouldn’t have chosen one another’s company. Polar opposites, they considered themselves. The flash of the demon’s ostentatious existence glared bright in the eyes of his begrudging companion’s quiet life, causing him to squint and shield his eyes. Yet, they were the ones, weren’t they? Over the span of human existence, they were the constants. Even the stars changed above them as they watched, but ever were the pair of them. 

It hadn’t always been so effortless. Or rather, comfortable. They were sojourners in this world. Businessmen sent out to peddle their trades. They knew the score - that their jobs were just their jobs, in this land far from where they’d belonged. Admittedly, Aziraphale seemed at times as though he might buy in a bit much to the corporate line, but for the most part even he acknowledged they were doing much the same things with their time on the Earth. A miracle was a miracle, and blessings were just thinly veiled temptations on the best of days.

They were something altogether other from comfortable, at the start. Casual. No, casual isn’t the word it wants… _Granted._ It was so _granted_ of a thing, so utterly commonplace for them to… The finest poet would struggle to put words on it, because there was no human likeness to what they had. Nothing that, for the utter entirety of a person’s existence, was present as an absolute, guaranteed surety. The pair were in permanent assignments on Earth, had no fear of being called home from fieldwork. Didn’t have it tick, tick, ticking through their unconscious that one day they would inevitably simply fail to return home. They lived in perfect certainty that the other, if they only waited long enough, would _always_ show back up again. It was even built into their jobs, to seek out this other entity - to get in the way of one another. And in that endless cosmic tangle, the knots that must form that can never be combed loose again. There simply isn’t the like in humanity. The experience of no author would have the security that angel and that demon had had from the days when the sheer sides of the mountains were still cooling from climbing up through the earth. The songwriters with their lyres could look at the pair and do nothing but default to the apprehension that humans, as transient, ephemeral flashes in the night, so many lightning bugs over the fields of cut hay, are. So that is what their affair was. Not casual or unhurried or unpressed. It was something simply… unthought of. Bloody unconsidered. 

Built into their “When will I see you again?” was never the implicit, “ _if_ I see you again.”

Sometimes, Crowley might have owned the word 'love' would the admission of humanity not have eaten at him like so much lye sprinkled in a grave. Crowley would stroke Aziraphale’s curls idly, thigh cast up over his hip, the image of one body moulded to another, in beds of hay or feathers or cotton or springs. Their eyes cast apart, lost in their own thoughts from the day. Who needed tempting next, what goodwill had been spread. Idly would his fingers trace through the platinum hair, his other arm thoughtlessly draped over his bedfellow and clutching the soft flesh of his side. Domestic bliss isn’t the right term. They were far from domestic, and bliss didn’t even enter into their vocabulary when they were together. Aziraphale might have owned it as well, the redhead breathing heavily, slumbering on his bare chest, one hand tucked under his arm and the other splayed out in front of his face, had it not been so right the way it already was. It wasn’t this tearing feeling, it wasn’t longing; neither a soldier aching for his lover. They fell into one another’s existence as a matter of chance and one another’s beds as a matter of course. 

Years of quirks and preferences wore themselves down into the hearts of one another. Satan, was Aziraphale’s sanctimony irritating. And Crowley was too flippant for either of their own good, he was going to get them both caught out one of these days. But either one could play the other like a fiddle. Or, that wasn’t altogether true. They were each their own sonata that drifted throughout their separate worlds, and when they crossed, the coda slid them into a familiar measure that was rarely fine, rarely delicate, but always sounded sweet. There was a comfort in knowing anyone as well as they did; in a way it was an anchor to who they were. Some reflected echo they were seen and known, and it allowed them to wind their way in and out of one another’s lives like silk ribbons in fiery plaits. 

As the years ambled on, they drew together more closely. A slow but inevitable orbit of two celestial bodies drawn together by some fault of their own gravities. Why be so far from the only companion you’ve known? They were the only of their kind, some amalgamation of not-quite-shouldn’t-be and not-quite-should. Not-quite-evil and not-quite-good. To whom could they belong but one another? Where could they call home throughout the ages but one another’s earshot?

The demon found Aziraphale during his weeks spent in Sumer. In the days, the angel lounged with the poets, convincing them to take their lyrics and preserve them forever. In the evenings, he would sit behind Crowley, pulling back his red hair, tucking it behind his ears to card his hands through. Root to end, root to end, fingertips massaging into his scalp as he chatted about the astounding stories the humans were committing to history. Crowley only closed his eyes to the sensation and listened to the angel’s soft voice - _Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet_ \- and the calm, constant thrum of his love for God. The demon might not want it anymore, but he could at least remember with some degree of fondness what it was like to have it. 

When Crowley, imp as he was, whispered into the ear of a scholar the perfect recipe for a powder that sparked and banged and scared the wits out of anyone around the blast, Aziraphale was there to sigh, to scold, to share the pomegranate arils, popping shocks of sharp nectar on and between their tongues. Also was he there to shout, to soothe, to share the turmeric and jiāng, burning unrelenting and unforgiving on but not between their tongues, when the humans shortly found new and chest-chilling uses for his invention. 

Vernacular scripture had been a joint venture, unintentionally, each planning the wide gesture for maximum impact. They denied for centuries that there had been an immediate simultaneous cancelling out of their actions by the other, arguing over whose side would gain greater benefit. Crowley bragged about the dissent the volumes would bring among a now-literate populace. It was like thousands upon thousands of apples from The Tree, he claimed, flopping down carelessly on the floor next to the angel to lean his back against the side of his chair, propping up one of the books on his knees. A huff and small grumble plodded its way from Aziraphale’s mouth at the jostle, his quill having skittered across his parchment. He waved his finger back and forth once over it to ‘erase’ the splotchy mistake. Aziraphale, for one, knew the books would help just as many souls find their way over to Heaven, so he tried his best not to brag back. No blowing trumpets and all that rubbish, he told himself. But, damn him, the fruit was too low (figuratively speaking), and Aziraphale wrapped his beautiful hands around it to pluck it from the tree - just one good, firm tug. He opened his mouth. With that, the evening began with sharp, bitten remarks and ended with bitten shoulders, kissed with star-scattered freckles and beautifully tender. 

\---

Finally their slow orbit became a tight spiral of a spatial embrace, finding homes in London and for once bringing themselves back to the same, singular place from assignments, children dashing back to home base before getting tagged ‘it.’ Life together became even more regular - _expected_ as the dew left behind when fog, impenetrable and heavy, finally lifts from the hills in the morning. 

They had returned to the bookshop from their respective duties of the day, all local, Crowley regaling the angel on whatever mischief he’d set out to do. He wasn’t just proud of his accomplishments, he was downright gleeful. Aziraphale wasn’t taking it with as much cheer, but still they neared the old, worn desk with the familiarity of a farmer pulling his old wooden cart through his fields, watching the sheep as they grazed lazily, dotting the hills - his hills, and his father’s before that. Aziraphale pressed his chest against the demon’s momentarily, pinning him loosely between his body and the desk, and took a moment to softly taste those infernal lips. Soft, supple, tantalizing lips that tasted like home. Crowley didn’t so much lean into it as comply, tilting his head and slowly responding. The kiss devolved into a set of small pecks from the both of them as the angel backed up again with a sigh. 

He began to unbutton Crowley’s trousers, cocking an eyebrow.

“I’m sure you didn’t _actually,_ ” the angel chided with a stern look. 

“I very much did,” Crowley responded, tugging to straighten the lapels of the angel’s waistcoat absently as his partner spread his flies and cupped the bulge quickening in his underwear.  
  
“Oh, _Crowley…_ ” he admonished with an eye roll to look up into gold. “You’re positively exasperating at times!” The demon’s hand smoothed up his chest to grasp at his neck, fingers finding the notches between his vertebrae. Aziraphale responded to the pressure, closing the distance to nestle against Crowley’s breast, wander down his stomach, and kneel to nuzzle his now-hardened erection. The heat from the ever-so-slightly-pliant organ pressed against his mouth and nose was comforting and almost unduly erotic.  
  
“If I weren’t exasperating, I wouldn’t be doing my job, Angel.” He closed his eyes and combed his fingers through the polished silk of blond hair in front of him. Aziraphale’s lips skipped with the friction as he dragged them along the fabric that covered the length of the demon. Crowley sighed lightly. “Where next are they sending you?” It was a gently coded question. An ask for how long to expect the company.

Aziraphale nipped the tip of his erection lightly, his lips curled to cover his teeth, and sat up a bit straighter on his knees. “Not certain. I haven’t yet been dispatched. I planned on staying here in London for a bit.” He pulled down the waistband of Crowley’s underwear, and his dick tumbled out next to Aziraphale’s face. He tilted his head to look up at him. “You?”

In response, Crowley cupped his jaw, grazing a thumb back and forth across his cheek. “Got to be in Manchester first of next week, but I’m my own demon till then.” He took a deep breath as he looked at him, the epitome of not-so-domestic not-quite-bliss, and Aziraphale leaned forward to kiss the small droplet forming at the end of his head. Crowley’s taste, like his voice and the palpable sensation of his presence in a room, was always familiar, as much like coming home that somewhere on Earth could feel. He’d have considered Crowley’s glorious cock to be God’s own magnum opus had he not known that the handiwork was all Crowley’s own. He wet his lips thoroughly and let Crowley’s hand guide his face forward to circle them loosely around the head. Crowley made a sound, a quietened rendition of being struck in the stomach. Aziraphale’s green eyes turned up again to catch the snake’s, then he suckled down on his thick erection…

It would have gone on like this, comfort in perpetuity, had the apocalypse not been dropped in the same lap that had cradled Aziraphale’s angelic head a single night before. The slip of paper tucked under his windscreen wiper was filthy, and his stomach dropped when he read it. He was already late. But really, it had already been Too Late long, long ago. 

_A tisket, a tasket, a baby and a basket; he’d journeyed on this earth for years, and on the way he’d loved it._


	2. Chapter 2

_He’d loved it, he’d loved it, and on the way he’d loved it. But the angel’s all that’s worth to keep, damn all the rest the planet._

There’s a game young children used to play. Might still, Crowley hadn’t really noticed. They danced together in a great circle on the grass, arms woven loosely together, and sang a rhyme as they went. Someone was always running, though, making a loop round that circle, someone young enough they hadn’t yet seen anything to run from. Round and round until, with no seeming place or purpose, he dropped a handkerchief on the ground behind one of his kin… and kept running. So quick must the second child be to snatch the fabric from the ground and catch the Runner, now distant with his clever head start, before he reaches the gap they left in the circle. The fate of the two depended upon the speed of Catcher. If they were unable to reach the Runner in time, they were condemned to take his place. If they caught him, on the other hand, they were owed a confession: _To whom does your heart belong?_

It didn’t hit Crowley right away - not when he handed over the crimson-laden basket - it wouldn’t for a decade more. He hadn’t even known he’d dropped the handkerchief in the first place, hadn’t known he’d been running. Instead, the big picture is the thing that cascaded down before his eyes. Immediately and without any warning, he saw the world and all its horrors and wonders ripped from under his feet, his plates tumbling and shattering to the ground as the cosmic tablecloth moved just slowly enough to pull it all down. For the next eleven years, that ‘ _world’_ meant all of it - the humans, the Bentley, the clothes… his life in all its modern comforts, and the angel only as a consequential part. And it really did seem like it would work. It really felt as though they had solved the puzzle and circumvented the means set to destroy their carefully constructed lives. 

They _did_ succeed, really. Together, they accomplished their goal, as they always had, opposite to one another but so very the same, as they’d always been. Warlock grew into a boy that wasn’t too wicked and wasn’t too pious. Just the right amount of normal. It would have been a spectacular victory, disposition-wise at least, had he only been their true target, if the hellhound had burst from the ground at his birthday to be utterly ignored by everyone but the three creatures that could sense it. The consequences of that missing dog pinged around in Crowley’s head as he drove them back to the bookshop. Small, light clinks of rain against crystal, left in the garden by brunchers dashing to escape a sudden summer shower.

No, it was the growl that shook waves through the occult depths of the universe as they sat considering their predicament that caused the truth to come rushing toward him; he hadn’t run quite quickly enough to get away. Crowley felt the horrid grip of the Chaser around the wrist that held his glass, and he looked across the table at his friend. In his mind, he saw the lot of them, dancing and chanting their rhyme. A gap stood in the ring of children, that if he could have just reached it… Crowley blinked. The angel’s fingers worried the glass on the table in front of him, and in his heart, Crowley turned to give the answer now due to his captor: _Aziraphale._

His eyes focused, and before him he saw _love_. The redefine-everything love. The let-the-lye-come-and-consume-me love. The frames in which his relationship with this angel were mounted shifted behind his ribs like great stone doors in ancient temples. In one way or another, they’d loved each other for thousands of years. Eons. Lifetimes. Partnered and bedfellowed. Befriended and hated. The game had changed now, and he was left holding nothing but a handkerchief and the taste of his confession on his tongue. Crowley experienced something new, then. Something human. 

The helplessness of ephemerality.

And so new was his need to save everything. It wasn’t the same anymore, couldn’t be. A panic. A frantic need to fix everything before he lost a treasure he hadn’t even realized he was holding, like waking suddenly on a ledge high above the city.

Aziraphale, however, was still standing on solid ground.

Crowley stayed with him that night, whether simply for more planning or just to be close to him for longer, he wasn’t sure. This was different. How strange to suddenly have a new sensation after 6000 years of the same ones. The angel eventually drifted to the couch, and Crowley followed a bit more hurriedly than he ever had before. Reached out to put his arm around his shoulders with a readiness that hadn’t quite been there before. Had his shoulders always been so soft? Had his warmth always radiated faintly past the fabric of Crowley’s jacket in such a lovely way? Yes, yes. Of course none of this was new, he could remember. But he wasn’t sure it had ever come along with such a sharpness to the sweet feeling.

For his part, Aziraphale just felt the comfort of his friend, as constant as it had always been - as constant as he expected that, somehow, it always would be. It was a failing of imagination on his part; Crowley had proven that more than a decade ago, hadn’t he? How could Aziraphale expect to keep his music when his composers were a few too many poor decisions away? And yet, he still didn’t see the parallel. Didn’t even think about it, really. That detachment hadn’t occurred to him. He leaned into Crowley’s embrace, though. And they talked about what they should do next. The morning came too soon, and with it two archangels. Heaven already pushing them apart. 

The demon kept expecting it to come, for Aziraphale to have that revelation. He seemed, despite his love of his quiet, unassuming life, ready to go back “home,” if that’s what God intended for him. Time and again, Crowley was convinced that his next effort would work - would break it to him that he was confused, uninformed… misled. But more than anything, Crowley just wanted to convince him that they were their own creation, separate from the fray. They didn’t have to be a part of it anymore. Somehow. If only things could go right. 

His new emotion grew stronger over the next two days. There wasn’t enough time - to look at Aziraphale the way he’d looked at him before - to touch him, unworried, unhurried, as he’d touched him before - to do anything normal at all; only look for the way to stop it all from ending. The sense of urgency grew, and yet opportunities to grasp at the now-fleeting moments were never quite there.

It wouldn’t come, though. Aziraphale never had that singular shock where it caught up to him. Never a companion piece to Crowley’s... just… red-paint-splattered-on-the-wall _need_ of _them_. For Crowley, it had burst through the thin fabric of his earthly concerns as a flood of realization. Aziraphale’s realization would come instead in slow waves. No, that’s wrong. Slow _surrenders_. Very reluctant, restricted, painful ceded bits of emotional land. 

No, Aziraphale hadn’t quite thought it through; it would have been astounding to have done it so very quickly. The angel faced a whole rollicking set of disasters, all tangled together into the illusion that they were all one. There was so much more for the angel to sort through that Crowley had long since indexed, filed, and archived. His faith, for one. That loss of faith, that reality that Heaven and Hell weren't what they said they were, or that Aziraphale believed they were, or that everyone bought into - Crowley was unbought. He sold his stock a lifetime ago. But the angel was only now feeling that certainty die within him, his hold on the carefully ordered components of his life slipping from his fingers as surely as playing cards he’d bridged a little too steeply. And so he grasped at them desperately as they fell through the air - too many fluttering past to get his hands on even a single one. But that didn’t stop him trying.

Aziraphale was distracted with finding the solution. After the book miraculously fell into his hands, the possibility of keeping his world shone in front of him like the sun. He would tell Gabriel, and it would stop. Then, by God’s grace, he’d settle down again in his home with his books and his wine and his demon, and his life would return to normal. 

It was facing his superiors in Heaven that made the first true impact on his reserve. His nerves may have begun the swell in the waters, but standing in the starkness of Heaven and fondly recounting, if surreptitiously, his relationship with the demon is what eroded that first bit of shoreline. Crowley… yes, there was something to Crowley. He needed time to make sense of the disruptions that wrinkled their way through his worldview. There was too much to untangle, too quickly, too suddenly in a single day - 6000 years of blind faith and misunderstandings all unraveling before him, and he couldn’t pick a single thread to claim the most important. It had begun, though. Scrutinized there by their stern faces, the only thing he knew to do… was lie. 

  
  


...and continue to lie. The Great Plan - God would solve it, God wouldn’t actually _take_ from Aziraphale. He wasn’t sure he believed this but had to keep believing anyway. He saw standing before him the man he… Well, he’d never really looked at it, had he, this indefinable thing he and Crowley shared. Why turn a lovely thing like that on its head when you haven’t got to? But he had to now, hadn’t he? He saw standing before him - with the soft smell of the nearby tropical garden drifting by and dusk falling around them - the man he _loved_. Had loved for millennia.  
  
_Crowley and the others were cast out…_

What had built over the span of the earth? Those inside jokes from pop culture no one within centuries would have remembered. That understanding silence, collapsed against one another on exhausted days. The unbreakable trust that Aziraphale could see now emanated from Crowley’s stance, even with nerves frothing through all the gaps in himself and surely pulsing through the demon as well, A trust that precluded any suspicion of the deception the angel was about to offer up. No, he couldn’t lose those things like Mozart’s _Sull’aria_. Crowley could come home. _Home_ , forgiven and brought home. He’d been an angel once, and he’d just have to go back to being one again. Sorted.

Crowley saw that for the absolute bullshit it was. He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. He wanted to snatch Aziraphale’s face in his hands and kiss him more passionately than he’d ever kissed him before. This wasn’t about the world anymore. Not the world he’d thought it had been about. The rest of the earthly experience wasn’t even worth it at all without the part of it that was just him and Aziraphale. So instead, he asked him to run off with him. That’s what you do when you see you’re desperately in need of someone. You throw out everything else. You throw out the people you knew before, all of the other things that you wanted - thought you wanted. The car, the clothes, the life… None of them meant anything without the most important part. The angel standing in front of him. It could all burn, as far as Crowley was concerned.

Aziraphale’s grip on the knot of his confused emotions slipped at the offer, and it was terrifying. It was infuriating. There was nothing in running away with Crowley that could reconcile the labyrinth of beliefs he was trying to align. Heaven was his option; Heaven was safe and known and nothing of an outer space he couldn’t anticipate. In the obscurity of terror, he redoubled his efforts, sent more men to guard the front lines and lose no more land, and not a one of those men would have refuted the sudden crow of a cockerel as the angel denied 6000 years of a relationship. Yet, immediately were they mowed down as the demon Crowley - the demon he’d lived his life with - stormed away from him. And a bit more land was lost after all.

Even after Crowley came in utter desperation, one last time, to beg him to reconsider - all Aziraphale could do was board up his windows and hope the supports would stand. It was almost unnatural not to yield, if visibly begrudging, to his friend’s requests. Climb into his car, rest his hand atop Crowley’s on the bench seat, and go off to do whatever it was he was supposed to be resisting. A small, nagging, uncanny feeling, like the first few hours after trimming your fingernails - watching him skid away and knowing distinctly that something was just missing enough. He’d fix it, have to fix it. God wouldn’t _take_ , if he could just explain it.

But with mere hours until the end, the words, those haunting words, _“You’re better off without him,"_ echoed through his chest, around his hummingbird heart.

Without him? Without him. A reel showing an existence without his companion kept trying to play through his mind, but each attempt stuttered out at all the familiar places. Trying to read his books for eons without the occasional body leaned up against him. No bicker every decade or so that dissolved to lovemaking on the floor. No bicker every decade or so that dissolved into no contact at all for even longer than that. No comfort, only nerves. No peace, only quiet.

He’d never be better off without him.

_The foolish man built his house upon the sands. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house…_

... _and it fell with a great crash._

Chunks of ice knocked into ribs on their way down to splash into the pit of Aziraphale’s stomach when the last of his homestead was overtaken.The Metatron reinforced all the archangels had said; all the things the demon had been saying all this time. Heaven wouldn’t help them. Panic and desperation cast the principality’s eyes toward Crowley - or rather, the means to reach Crowley. Saving the world meant staying with him. That was the most important message; he was on his side. They could work together, to stay together. 

The message never quite made it, not for either of them. Two hands reached out to one another just barely unsynchronized enough. This, too, was par for their course. But this time, when their fingertips managed only to brush one another’s, the devastation was monumental.

The end. 

The end of _them_ hit Crowley quite literally - a blast of water throwing him to the floor to leave him raging at a loss he was expecting, but not at all prepared to face. What better illustration for the fleeting nature of their lives together than flames consuming old books kept far too long? They’d pushed it, the two of them. Pushed their lines of Good and Evil closer and closer together until they were more human than even several actual humans. Had he read any of them, these books his angel gathered to himself? Appropriate, wasn’t it. Two hundred years surrounded by these books, and not until now did he think he should have thumbed across their gilded pages. That was Aziraphale, now. Smoke rising in Alexandria.

And then, in the tragic way it always happens, his grieving had to be set aside by other concerns of existence. This one, of course, being the lack thereof. He could get pissed as all Heaven and hope for a good seat to watch the blood begin to rain from the sky. He could go and try and save the world on his own. Or, he could split the difference and come close to doing both. There were a couple of hours left, after all. He tried hard not to think of how many thousand years Hell would torture him for fumbling that particular apocalyptic ball. It really was an impossible situation that had no attainable solution. But he’d find some sodding way around it, he knew. That was his modus operandi, bolstered by his bloody optimism. Deeply steeped in the gloomy brew of a cynic, but optimism nonetheless. 

That’s how he found himself drained, tripping out of his near-molten vehicle to be faced, ready or not, with his eternal companion, waving politely at a panic of humans, as he was wont to do. He liked people, and he liked to be friendly. The impact was blunted by the bodily exhaustion that comes from willing disintegration out of your car for some 50 miles when the urgent voice of his dead friend came from the mouth of one of them. The emotion just wasn’t there to have - so the best he had was _normalcy._ Not that it was normal seeing Aziraphale blink a man out of existence (or at least out of Oxfordshire); in the very back of his mind, that was actually ever so slightly arousing. But they slipped into their duo as easily as the angel into his softened leather loafers. It was easy enough; each one had always been nothing more or less than himself - and here they were, as purely themselves as always.

As the anxious but ineffectual witnesses they’d been since Creation, they watched the paragon of humanity face down War, Pollution, Famine, and Death - and choose life. They watched him face down Hell and Heaven - and choose neither. And when Satan came to end it himself, and the very thing he’d just lost asked Crowley what he _really_ had to lose, the demon could only respond by taking Adam’s lead - and choosing to fight. 

Aziraphale knew they’d have to do it themselves, on their own. Far from angel or demon now, far from shining examples of Right or Wrong, nebulous concepts that had gone right off the rails in the very Beginning; some standalone pair of unnamed creatures they’d moulded themselves into without ever knowing it was happening. If it was going to end, it was going to end together. He reached for his adversary, his lover - his best friend - and they said goodbye.

\----

Absolutely nothing changed when the world ended up staying right where it ought to be, and it was all completely unknown. It’s true that Aziraphale now knew, like Crowley, they had no one to count on but each other. Strangest irony that he’d shared a bed all this time with Knowledge personified yet had to pluck and eat that apple all on his own for it to take. 

Their orbit had ended, the irresistible gravity causing the two planets to collide and meld into one. Why not be with the only companion you’ve known? They were the only of their kind, after all. Some amalgamation of not-quite-wrong and not-quite-right. Not-quite-dark and not-quite-light. To whom could they belong but one another? Where could they call home throughout the rest of their lives but one another’s arms? 

They’d returned, weary and bewildered, to the bookshop. It was familiar - the farmer, his cart. His sheep and his hills. They’d shed their clothes along the way on their simple survey of their land. Aziraphale’s lips were so warm and parted perfectly to Crowley’s tongue, a dance rehearsed to muscle memory. It was slippery and gentle. It was when the angel noticed his fingers were aching that he realized he’d had the tips of them dug hard into Crowley’s back for longer than he could recall. He didn’t seem to mind being clutched at hard enough to bruise as he held Aziraphale in his arms. 

“Couldn’t you have aimed better?” Aziraphale whispered, chiding through hot breath.

“Could have done,” Crowley whispered back, words broken up by wet kisses, “Charred archangel, though. Put you on a whole new list, that.” He gracefully fell backward onto the couch and pulled Aziraphale down onto his lap. Sweet. So sweet was the smell of his angel’s skin, mouth and nose pressed into his arm, lips dragging along just for the feel of it. So alive under his lips. So present and solid and real. He embraced him. Held him. Felt everything there was to feel. When he tilted his hips, Aziraphale groaned a sound Crowley knew but had never truly heard. 

Aziraphale reached between them, took them both in hand, and stroked. The demon followed his lead, moving his hand to open his partner to take him. It was unhurried, as if they hadn’t only just discovered the nature of urgency. Their lips met again, and the combination of sensations was too much for Aziraphale to bear. Their flesh was hot and sticky under his hand; he was stretched around the clever, careful fingers inside of him; he could feel the blood pulsing into their firm erections. Slow, quiet tears streaked down his face, the small trickle of a spring from ice just beginning to melt on the mountains. 

“Crowley…” he whispered as he shifted to position himself over his lover. He looked into the amber eyes that now made his heart swell to even think of. “I’m so sorry.”

Crowley gazed back into his eyes, searched them, and shook his head with the slightest of a sad smile. “I love you.” 

Anguish and the relief from it washed over Aziraphale’s face, his eyelids falling to surrender more tears, cutting red stripes down his cheeks.

The touches - lazily skimmed fingers across soft, snow white flesh; Aziraphale’s face pressed into Crowley’s shoulder as he rocked back and forth on his lap; the supple lips against the angel’s neck - they were the same. But they were also something the two had never experienced before in their existence. 

There _would_ be a war - it would come, and this time they wouldn’t know when. And again they’d be faced with goodbye.

So, pressed against one another, in the familiar, granted sensations they knew from a record on repeat so long it had worn the needle down to the nub, they felt one another as if they never would again. And, as was their unavoidable fate, they loved.

**Author's Note:**

> Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life  
> what you will eat or what you will drink,  
> nor about your body, what you will put on.  
> Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  
>  **Consider the birds of the air,  
>  for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns;**  
> yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  
> Are you not of more value than they?  
> And which of you by being anxious  
> can add a single hour to his span of life?
> 
> _Matthew 6:25-27_   
> 


End file.
